In 1856, five thousand armed San Francisco vigilantes marched on the jail, seized two prisoners, and hanged them from roof beams, a takeover that cleaned streets for a season and tested the limits of lawful order.
James King of William walked home through San Francisco that evening after printing a story about a rival publisher’s prison time in New York. James Casey stepped from behind a wagon, threw back his cloak, and shot King in the abdomen with a revolver. King staggered into a nearby building. Casey surrendered to police.
Angry crowds gathered while doctors worked on the wounded journalist. Businessmen met in secret on the third floor of a Sacramento Street building and formed the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856. They said their purpose was the “purification” of a city King had denounced as soft on crime and corruption. Four days after Casey’s arrest, roughly 5,000 armed men, many carrying muskets and rifles, marched on the county jail with a cannon at the entrance.
Thousands watched from Telegraph Hill. California Gov. J. Neely Johnson and William Tecumseh Sherman, the newly appointed commander of the state militia, stood helpless on a nearby hotel roof. The jail surrendered Casey and Charles Cora, an Italian gambler whose earlier trial for killing a U.S. marshal had ended in a hung jury after claims of self-defense.
King died of his wounds. Four days after the surrender, the committee hanged Casey and Cora from beams projecting from the roof of its headquarters. Over the next two months the committee hanged two more men, arrested dozens of supporters of political boss David Broderick, most of them Irish Catholics, and deported them by steamship to the East Coast. Copies of the San Francisco Herald were burned in a bonfire. Advertisers were intimidated into leaving the paper.
Less than a decade earlier, massive gold strikes in the Sierra Nevada foothills had turned a tiny trading post into a city of 50,000 almost overnight. Clipper ships poured through the Golden Gate. Steamships carried gold worth as much as $2 million, nearly $80 million in today’s dollars, east twice a month.
A Californian later remembered the mood: “Money traveled fast and free.” Another recalled, “People became intoxicated with prosperity. They overbuilt, overbought, threw money around in a reckless manner, and indulged to excess in all the harmful things of life.”
When the precious-metals supply leveled off, hydraulic mining enriched corporations while individual prospectors drifted into wheat farming. Waterfront warehouses sat empty. Dockworkers lost jobs. Banks began to fail the following year. One San Franciscan described the result: “The ripples of disaster spread wider and wider,” shown in “tenantless houses, declining wages and revenue.” Crime and political muscle filled the vacuum. King, a failed banker turned widely read journalist, cast himself as the indignant truth-teller.
He had already denounced the mayor in print. Nathaniel Philbrick recounted King’s words:
"Look at your mayor, imbecile for any good, encouraging rogues and scoundrels by his leniency."
On Cora, King wrote flatly: “Cora must be hung!” And: “Nothing short of that will satisfy the claim of justice.” King also carried a deep-seated hatred of the Catholic Church and foreigners in general. An anonymous letter in a rival paper questioned his Custom House coverage and noted that his brother Tom worked there. King demanded the author’s name. Casey, the publisher who refused to name the writer, warned King to be prepared to defend himself. King then printed Casey’s New York prison record. The shooting followed that night.
Sherman, a former army officer turned banker, was determined to oppose the vigilantes. He later described them as “an irresponsible organization claiming to be armed with absolute power.” He had no practical choice but to yield Casey and Cora. Afterward he resigned as general of the state militia and returned to his bank in historic Jackson Square, a building that still stands.
The committee’s reach soon exceeded its original targets. On June 21, state Supreme Court Justice David Terry, a veteran of the war with Mexico, interfered in an arrest on Jackson Street. In the melee he pulled a bowie knife and stabbed the committee’s police chief, Sterling Hopkins, in the neck. The committee locked Terry in a cell at its headquarters. One member admitted the problem:
"We started to hunt coyotes; but we’ve got a grizzly bear on our hands, and we don’t know what to do with him."
By early August the committee released Terry and disbanded its army. The editor of the San Francisco Herald had already written that the city rested “beneath the shadow of a vast and ominous despotism.”
In his memoirs Sherman refused the tidy victory narrative. He wrote:
"As they controlled the press, they wrote their own history, and the world generally gives them the credit of having purged San Francisco of rowdies and roughs, but their success has given great stimulus to a dangerous principle, that would at any time justify the mob in seizing all power of the government; and who is to say that the Vigilance Committee may not be composed of the worst, instead of the best, elements of a community."
Five years after standing against the committee, Sherman served as a Union army general and opposed another attempt to overthrow a duly elected government. The businessmen who organized the 1856 committee insisted they were answering King’s call against lawlessness. They hanged four men, deported political opponents, silenced a newspaper, and briefly held a state Supreme Court justice. Then they stood down.
Philbrick’s account appears in connection with his book “The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World,” published by Viking. The bare record from 1856 needs no modern embroidery: a boom city lost its easy money, courts and politicians looked weak, a journalist was shot in the street, and five thousand armed men decided they would supply the justice themselves.
When lawful authority fails to keep order, the temptation to replace it with raw force never stays buried for long, and the men who seize that force rarely stop at the villains they first named.
